CARONNI, Felice

(Monza 1747 - Milano 1815) churchman. In 1790 he was in Hungary to organise the numismatic collections of Count Mihaly Viczay at Hedervar. The following year he travelled for nine months all around Europe, collecting coins, gems and manuscripts. In 1979 he was back in Italy. In 1804, while travelling from Palermo to Naples, he was captured by pirates and taken to Tunisia. He was liberated after three months, but when he reached Leghorn he was quaranteened till 1805. In 1805 he published his memoir of the imprisonment in Tunisia, Ragguaglio del viaggio compendioso d'un dilettante antiquario sorpreso da' corsari e condotto in Barberia e felicemente ripatriato (1805). The following year he published a second memoir, Ragguaglio di alcuni monumenti di antichità ed arti raccolti da un dilettante antiquario (1806), where he described the ruins of Carthage among other things. In 1806 he was in Vienna and then again in Hedervar. In 1808 he visited the mines in Transilvania, and four years later he published a memoir on this journey, Caronni in Dacia. Mie osservazioni... sui Valacchi specialmente e zingari transilvani (1812). He went back to Milan, but had to flee to Austria because of his anti-French feelings. When Milan passed again under Austrian domination, he went back and died there in 1815.

DBI
Clerici 2008, p. 1257

Ragguaglio del viaggio compendioso

Ragguaglio di alcuni monumenti

Caronni in Dacia

Bertola de Giorgi, Aurelio

(Rimini 1753 - Rimini 1798) poet and academic, fled to Hungary as a young man to join the military life. In 1783 he was in Vienna, where he got in contact with fellow citizen Giuseppe Garampi, who was the Nuncio (diplomatic representative of the Holy See) there.

He travelled in Switzerland (where he met the beloved poet Salomon Gessner) and in Germany; this experience is told in Viaggio sul Reno e ne' suoi contorni (1795). 

His writings contributed to the diffusion of Pre-Romantic themes in Italy. DBI

ACERBI, Giuseppe

(Castelgoffredo MN 1776 – 1843). Great traveller, director of the Biblioteca Italiana (1816-1826), Austrian Consul in Egypt (1826-1834). In 1796 he set off on a long tour in Northern Europe which brought him as far as the North Cape. He sojourned in England and Ireland between 22 June 1796 and spring 1797, about which he left a manuscript journal (Diario) published by Simona Cappellari in 2012. He went back to England after his journey to Lapland, and in London he published his Travels through Sweden, Finland and Lapland to the North Cape in the years 1798 and 1799 (1802). Besides his Diario del soggiorno in Inghilterra (ms. 1307/1), the Biblioteca Teresiana in Mantova preserves numerous papers and travel documents (Carte Acerbi, b. II, n. 2-4), among which the Diario di viaggio attraverso l’Austria, la Germania e l’Inghilterra da Castel Goffredo a Bath (ms. 1287) and undated letters to his brother Luigi (Cfr. Cappellari, pp. 10 and 12). DBI (which does not mention the first English sojourn).